We have small houses and large mortgages. We went to raves and we stopped fighting at football matches. We got very drunk one night in 1997 then felt betrayed because of Iraq. We like being European and we understand the world is interconnected and complicated. We thought everyone knew that the headlines about Brussels Being Bananas were just jokes. We didn’t realise anyone took The Sun seriously. We can follow an argument and spot a lie. We have friends in other countries and we’re embarrassed. We feel completely disconnected from half our neighbours and felt the need to apologise in person to our Polish friends at the school gate. We’ve explained to our kids that grandad isn’t really a racist and that we’ll still be allowed to go camping in France.

We are lecturers, nurses, systems analysts and engineers. We are the civil service. We run small businesses. We work for large, foreign-owned companies. We aren’t in charge but we are the backbone of the country. We didn’t go to Eton. We are grown-ups. We can’t leave because our kids are at school and our parents are getting old. We wish that we were Scottish, or Irish. We didn’t prepare ourselves for this because we didn’t believe it could possibly happen.

We’d really like an electable opposition. We want a plan B, a climbdown, a compromise. We want common sense to come back into fashion. We are reduced to posting on Facebook because we haven’t worked out what to do yet. We will. We want our country back.